and 100 pounds of rice per month in one of
the government bureaus. He had only one
wife; he could not have supported a second.
"But these are not the poorest people," said
Kumar. "Here they live in houses and eat
enough. The very poor are not so lucky."
He showed them to me, the very poor, liv
ing beside small ditches under plastic sheets
laid over frames of sticks, or under roadside
trees. A woman combed another's hair. "She
is looking for little animals," he said.
The houseless men wandered the streets,
looking for work or collecting things. Any
things at all: splinters of glass or crockery,
bits of plastic, of wood, of metal. No tin cans
littered Djakarta's back alleys; cans have
value. Men use magnets to fish for iron scrap
in the canals. Small boys collect old wet
cigarette butts.
"What happens to these houseless people
when it rains?" I asked.
"They stand on porches of people who
have houses. Sometimes this is permitted. In
such cases, they will not take anything."
"There really are two populations here,"
said David J. Levin, Publications Officer at
the United States Embassy, "those who live
in the houses, and those who live in front of
them. And yet, things are better than they
were, because now there's hope."